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Don’t worry, the rest of us don’t like the process either.
This kinda depends on the job though. An office job, there’s always going to be a social side because unless you’re just a flunky, collaboration is a necessary skill for a skilled job in most office settings.
The extent of needed skill at the kind of social interaction you can estimate via interview varies, and a lot of people get stuck and screwed over when they don’t actually need that skill set for the job, but we can’t just pretend that even a minority of office work allows for a person to be an island. You at least have to be able to interact with project managers that keep otherwise unconnected workers synced up.
It helps if you can say that you suck at interviews, but can execute on the job, and can both say it in a useful way, then back up that claim. Not every hiring person will deal with that, which is bullshit imo, but even that is not outside of the range of bare minimum social skills.
When it comes right down to it, we as workers in a capitalist system have to make hard choices unless we want to start a revolution. You either work on the people skills, reject the kind of work that takes interviews and interaction, or you ask for accommodations and hope that works out.
The system as-is sucks for anyone not built for capitalist dreck like cookie cutter interviews, and it needs change.
I work in an office and I’m sure an autistic person could do my job just fine. The degree of socialization in my office is fairly low unless you initiate conversations with everyone intentionally. The real joke is needing to sit in a cubicle when your job can be done entirely remotely.
Most of this is because, for people who are hiring/interviewing, this is a distraction from the job they were hired to do. Figuring out who to hire isn’t usually one of their core competencies. So they base their decision on superficial bullshit (and then if needed justify their choice later). Often as the job seeker, you’ve learned more about candidate selection than they have, so you’d be better at picking someone than they would.
Hiring for expertise and personailty is a tough set of skills to pair. Reminds me of software I had to work with where you had to have accounting and database skills. Nothing mutually exclusive there, but it’s tough to find people with both.
Best you can do is layer it. HR does a quick call to see that you’re not an antisocial asshole, maybe something a tad more in depth later, passes to the team’s management to go forward.
My last employer did quite well. I sat a 2-hour interview with the whole team. Yes, we got breaks, and as much as anything, that sold me on the job. “The job is very human.” And it was! Great company.
This doesn’t make logical sense. If candidates are studying for what will get them jobs then that wouldn’t make them experts in what is needed for the job but the frivolous bullshit that will get them hired.
I think most people who hire people prefer a personal recommendation because they are never trained on how to spot talent. When they can’t take that shortcut, they grasp at straws.
Rarely do you come across someone who actually knows how to pick the best candidate.
Or, picking the best candidate is inherently an impossible task given too little data and too much variability in people’s responses and ability to read the interviewer and give them what they want.
Maybe. To me it seems that you could become good at it if you worked at it.
This is worth watching in its entirety but it points out why interviewers are rarely actually experts in any way: https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?si=n39py_-N_gPzPYGa
In short, the only way to get good at something is to try it repeatedly with feedback. Generalized interviewers / HR perform enough interviews to get better at them, but they don’t get meaningful feedback. Whether or not a candidate is actually good for a job often won’t be clear for months to years and an HR interviewer is often completely disconnected from that.
Conversely an on-team interviewer might get to see a candidate grow and perform, but simply doesn’t perform enough interviews to get good at it. They’re too busy working on the team doing stuff and most teams aren’t hiring that many people, that often, for them to get enough sample data.
And these forces oppose each other, the more actual task work you do, the less you’ll be interviewing others, both because you’re busy doing other stuff and because if you’re focused in a niche task then you’ll have less expertise to interview a broader range of positions. But the more broadly your responsibilities, the less of an expert you are. Same thing with team size, the larger the team, the more hires, but also the more people to do the interviews.
Companies value referrals because the whole interview process is inherently flawed and unfixable.
“What’s you’re biggest weakness?”
“I’m going to say my honesty”
“Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness…”
“I don’t give fuck what you think.”.
Had more or less this exact conversation with the manager during an interview for a promotion I really wanted years ago.
I did not get it.
“you’re hired”
Everyone needs to go through that shit at least once… if you’re lucky you can lean on your network of former co-workers to provide references that let you just be open “I suck at interviewing” from that point onward. I hope you eventually achieve this blissful state because I too cannot maintain eye contact for more than half a second.
Honestly every person who tells an autistic person to ‘leverage their network’ deserves to get dickpunched by a bear
Oh yeah because us autistic people are WELL KNOWN for our networking skills…
Just crosspost :)
I did before I left that comment. I just wanted to make sure you knew that community existed since this meme really has nothing to do with ADHD and everything to do with autism, and you posted it in the ADHD community.
I’ve posted in ausome memes a bunch already ;)
One of the best things you can do to prep is to find someone you can relate to at least a little bit who’s already been through it, ideally someone with a few years under their belt, and do mock interviews with them. Interviewing sucks, it’s not an easy skill and you hopefully won’t need it very much. The first ones are always the hardest.
Maybe an alternate perspective, but I do a lot of interviews for technical roles like developers, product owners, architects, etc.
There’s often a perception that the role can be done isolated at a desk grinding on tasks, but that is often not the case. It’s easy to find people who will do task work, but really hard to find people who are capable communicators and empathizers with the people they will be working with. At the end of the day, we’re trying to fill the roles with someone who we can trust alone in a room with a customer, and not someone who will be alone in a room doing tasks.
I was just going to say something similar to this. The job application is an assessment for your technical abilities/skills for the job.
The interview is a second assessment to gauge your personality and communication to make sure it’s a fit for the team.
There are VERY few jobs where you can work in isolation. Teamwork, personality and communication are important for almost all jobs. Hench the assessment that gauges those aspects.
I always hated this side of “communication, teamwork, and personality” early in my career. I thought those soft skills were overvalued by people who weren’t good in their technical skill.
Now that I’ve been a senior engineer for a while, I can say the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills. It sucks leading people with bad attitude and those whom we have to babysit all the time.
Lemmy is eat up with kids who downplay soft skills, sometimes acting like those skills are not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Happy to see so many in this conversation talking about their importance!
And us IT nerds are the worst, or were historically. Used to be, you could be antisocial and literally stinky, but hey, we had the arcane knowledge employers had to have. They were forced deal with us weirdo wizards, what with our long hair, holey jeans and beat up Chuck Taylors. Not so any longer. (I’d argue we’ve made huge strides towards a middle ground!)
Reminds me of the return-to-office hate around here. A mandatory, 5-day RTO is a revolting policy that only loses the best employees, plain dumb. But around here we act like there is no benefit to in-person collaboration. It’s obvious to me and I have a dozen examples at hand. Plus, you gonna tell me a group of social animals gains nothing from being social?! Jesus that’s naive.
You know you can be social outside of work, right?
Just because we are ‘social’ animals doesn’t mean we spend every moment picking lice out of each others hair.
but that is often not the case
Is that what you think as a manager or is that the answer I would get from your most introverted dev?
95% of my work is done by me, alone at a desk…
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But I don’t want to be alone in a room with a customer. I specifically avoid customer facing positions.
And I thrive at those positions. Hell, give me an angry customer and I’ll solve their problem, at least move it along for them, legitimately help, and have them apologizing for being an ass.
You sit in the back and crank it out, I’ll cover for you on the front lines!
Sure, just get me hired first ;)
Working on IT, I see quite the spectrum. One of which was a guy who was socially lacking. He did his job ok, but in office, he didn’t know how to interact with other people. He would bring his own pickles and put them in the fridge, and fish them out for a snack. Then he would get ice for his water, and go back to work. He missed a critical step of using a utensil or washing his hands, and it took a while for everyone to realize why the ice started tasting off.
Then we find that he didn’t wash his hands thoroughly, and I got sick eating chips he had rummaged through earlier.
He did an ok job at his desk, but made other people uncomfortable because he couldn’t pick up on enough social queues to prevent people from disliking him.
He was eventually let go for trying to fix a cable under the desk of the only girl in the office, on the day she wore a skirt. This was far and beyond extreme and I wouldn’t expect most people, no matter where they fall in the spectrum, to behave this way. But the interviews are to try to suss that out. “Culture fit”, I think they’d call it.
True. What the image should say is Capitalism is hell for autistic people. And non-autistic people. And all other people. Capitalism is really only not hell for those born wealthy.
Yea, because non-free-markets don’t require people to get along?
Capitalism hates free markets. Capitalism is all about maximizing profit at all costs. Free markets promote competition, which negatively impacts profit. It’s why so many capitalists seek to monopolize markets.
No, but the difference is you don’t have the threat of starvation and homelessness if you can’t do it.
I’m guessing you weren’t around for the Soviet Union, where every country behind the Iron Curtain was a poverty stricken hellscape (and still hasn’t fully recovered). I’ll take the end-stage capitalism we’re currently enduring over that shit any day of the week.
This is too involved a topic for a thread like this, but the red scare propaganda we learned about the Soviet Union isn’t a complete picture of how things were there. From researching around, it seems like at least on the dietary front, their caloric/nutritional consumption was comparable to the US, although there’s some variation in the estimates of different researchers/institutions. Sure, they didn’t have Macdonalds or Pineapples and stuff like that. But not having shitty unhealthy fast food and a fruit that could only be as widely available as it was in the west through imperialism isn’t exactly what I’d call a poverty stricken hellscape.
As far as recovering even now… there was a really important thing that happened between then and now that’s had an impact on these countries: privatization. Sell off public goods to private interests so they can profit off them at the expense of everyone else. And surprise, like we see everywhere else, private businesses don’t act in the public good and only occasionally, incidentally produce results that are good for everyone.
Like I said though, it’s a really complicated topic that’s worth reading more on if you genuinely want to learn. They didn’t do everything right, but these communist societies managed to rise out of feudal or colonial systems to become modern industrial powers despite all the forces aligned against them.
As for capitalism, even if it can produce great abundance,
a) That isn’t actually benefiting the vast majority of people. It’s hard to overstate how cruel it is to have people going hungry in a country that can produce so much food it throws a lot of it out with only like ~2% of it’s population working on a farm.
b) Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of that abundance isn’t merely from free trade and the ingenuity of industry. A LOT of it is built off the exploitation of other countries and the over-use of resources to the point of causing environmental damage.
Whatever you think society should be like, it isn’t hard to make a less cruel, less environmentally destructive, and more inclusive system than capitalism.
Absolutely. Capitalism categorizes all people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’, the former really being ‘exploitably productive’.
Lots of folks with tons to offer the world are shunted off to the side because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital. Either that, or their challenges are perceived as too substantial for the accumulationists to bother to see what accommodations could be made.
But why bother when humans-go-in-money-comes-out is the depth of all thinking and concern? It’s not the company’s job to care that people are starving three houses over! Why don’t they just get a job—
because what they can offer isn’t valued by capital
People categorize people as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’. Hell, get down to Biology 101 and mate selection, animals select useful against useless. What do you have to offer?
“I’m having a heart attack! Help!”
“I’m a really nice guy that does wonderful paintings of the local pelicans!”
“Fuck off, I need a skilled physician and I’ll pay anything right now!”
Yes, people get paid more or less dependent upon their use to society. Why would society support you if you have little, or nothing, to contribute? For those of us in first world countries, we’re populous enough and technologically advanced enough to support a wide range of talents. Of course there are plenty of counter examples, but that’s mainly how it goes in any given economic or governmental framework.
tl;dr: We’re social animals with needs. Fulfill needs or GTFO. You don’t have to like it, but you better understand it.
I hear you and essentially don’t disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.
- Plenty of people are fine communicators when it comes to genuine collaborative work but still find the “game” of job applications very difficult or impossible.
- Being left alone with a customer is not a thing at all for many roles.
- Embracing diversity in abilities and doing so transparently is a thing that can be valuable for both companies and humanity. Presuming everyone can do all the things is, IMO/IME, damaging. It leads to cutting out people who have something valuable to offer. But also leads to not recognising when people are properly bad at something despite the fact that they really shouldn’t be given their seniority and role.
In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.
Yes I agree, you make some really valuable points here that I don’t disagree with. There’s a bit of an art to this and it is certainly not a realistic expectation that someone should be universally capable. Somewhere in that gray space between universally capable and walking hr incident is where we all fall.
Well said.
I can mask pretty easy dealing with customers because for the most part the interaction is predefined.
Trying to deal with the doublespeak and lies and unspoken requirements of situations like interviews is hard/impossible.
Because its all nebulous.
I think it’s also nebulously counter- or peri- factual in that it’s looking for signals whose value is often that you know to give that signal. Meanwhile the qualities relatively unique to NDs can be hard or impossible to signal.
There are many jobs where the vast majority of your workforce does not also have to be your sales department. Expecting everyone to do so is ableism.
You’re right about many jobs not being sales, my apologies if I made it sound like my scope of commentary was exclusively oriented to those roles.
Social skills are important more broadly than sales, and I’m mostly talking about how they apply in the organization as someone interacts with other peers.
But how do I show I am that guy day-to-day but not when it’s a high pressure situation I’ve been playing my head over and over for days?
I’ve found ways around it but never know when you could need this kind of advice.
Let it go.
Seriously. That’s the answer. Don’t worry about the interview. Just see it as another conversation.
I the end, interviews are no better than picking names out of a hat, this from research done by Harvard some 20+ years ago.
Just see it as another conversation.
How is this supposed to be better.
I’m not sure I’m capable tbh. My workaround has been to get a temp job somewhere, be myself, then get offered a full time gig. It’s worked multiple times but it’s ironically more effort.
I’ve done that a dozen times. Worst case, you stack your resume. What’s wrong with that?
The interviewer(s) has no power over your life, not presenting your case to a judge here. You didn’t have the job when you woke up this morning, you may or may not have it when you go to bed. You can’t lose anything, only gain.
Some advice that has stuck with me came from Andrew Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, modern sensibilities take that old-school title all wrong. It’s a book about the author’s quest to better understand social interactions and document his findings for future people feeling as lost as he did, thereby making himself a better person. It’s the only book I’d recommend to anyone. Give it a spin.
When faced with potentially world shattering change, and an interview is not that, I force myself to take a breath and ask, “What happens if the very worst consequence I can imagine comes true?” Go nuts here, get dark, what’s the worst you can imagine?
The answer is invariably, “I’ll soldier on, somehow survive.” Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.
“Will I get this job?” is nothing compared to the many difficulties life throws up. I’m on the hunt now, after leaving an employer that treats their employees like gold. In fact, I’m on severance pay ATM, but running out fast. What if I have to go back to an office everyday? What if I only end up getting paid half what I was making? Fuck, what if I end up selling boiled peanuts on a corner downtown to make our mortgage? Well, I won’t die, that’s for sure.
The second thing I’d say, talk to the interviewer just as you would a friend of a friend, an acquaintance that maybe has an opportunity for you. They’re not kings, and you’re not their subject. Approaching them as an equal makes one hell of a difference, exudes sincerity, and that lets them see you as your really are. And isn’t that what you both want?
Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.
Plenty of people blow their brains out. 1 in every 12 autistic people attempt it anyway.
Not directly related but something I found while looking that stat up: a full 18% of 8-year-old autistic kids apparently have a suicide plan.
You can’t lose anything, only gain.
Idk about you, but I value my time. 5 hours spent for an interview process that does not end with an offer is a loss to me.
It’s always who you blow and not what you know. A “good fit” is better for the office than a “skilled worker.”
Relevant skills for most jobs are both technical and social, I think you’re implying that the decision is often made purely on social skill sets when technical are what matters and I see this differently.
If I’m hiring for an Architect for example, I am expecting them to help grow and guide developers, engineers, analysts, and administrators while collaborating with stakeholders AND possessing relevant domain technical expertise. Only having the domain technical expertise isn’t useful without the social skill set to leverage it.
Similarly if I’m hiring for an engineer, in expecting them to work with other engineers, their architect, their analysts, and their supervisors AND have relevant domain expertise. Again if they only have one half of that they aren’t actually functional.
It does change for entry level roles, and this may be an unpopular take… but for entry level roles I could care less about your technical knowledge… I’m looking for people who are entering this domain and can demonstrate intangibles like initiative, curiosity, and…. social skills. These are much better leading indicators of success as they are harder to teach and train, and frankly if they have those skills I can trust that the senior roles around them will help develop their technical skills.
Interviews are currently the standardized testing of the corporate world.
Now you are the kind of boss I enjoy working with.
“Well-paying”
Yes, there are well paying jobs in the world, specially for things autistic people are stereotypically good at, like programming.
DON’T YOU DARE ARGUE WITH ME
Yea…no…you’re not taking a 4 round interview for one little task. That job is going to have bullshit corporate politics attached to it. If you can’t make it through that interview you’re not going to make it through the bullshit corporate politics.
If it’s really a simple task, it’ll be two rounds, and pay like ass.
Yea but I think part of the point is the corporate politics are not required to do the job, they are required to work at that company.
Also what the op finds simple may not be to average people, but if they have specialized skills and training, it becomes a ‘simple’ task.
I don’t see the distinction. For example, I code…but to get my code out I have to deal with like 4 other teams and their ridiculousness…
If I were at a smaller shop, I’d have to be better at dealing with my coworkers and maybe the customers.
As dumb as some of the interview process is, it does indeed weed out people who won’t be good in that environment.
(With that said, I’ve been in completely adversarial interviews that had nothing to do with the work in question and was just an opportunity for the principle to shit on his lessers).
I’ve been consistently top performing in all my positions with glowing reviews from all my managers. I can play with the corporate game very well. And yet almost all my jobs were found through networking and the few interview cycles I’ve attempted were always failures, often surprising the people who vouched for me on how bad I was at interviewing. I’m talking failed interviews which I ended up getting in demoted through another neurospicy person fighting for the me against management, only for me to outperform everyone else by 50%.
These are not the same skills.
Am I the only one with adhd who’s good at and enjoys networking? Most of it is just asking specific questions based on prior information you’ve been given by the other person.
Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it’s not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they’ve had. Then you get them to “teach” you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you’ve succeeded in networking.
People are passionate about their skills and hobbies, and most love to elaborate and explain the specifics of it, especially when they usually don’t get to do it.
Remember those “Joe is forcing us to see his travel pictures” joke? This is basically that but you’re actually interested in the pictures. Listening to someone being passionate about something is a lot more fun than others lead you to believe, give it a try, it’s basically nt infodumping.
I’m really great at networking. It’s the only way I’ve found to find new jons. I still suck at interviewing though
Really important is identifying a topic the other is passionate about, maybe it’s not even work related, but a hobby or a travel experience they’ve had. Then you get them to “teach” you about it by asking them to elaborate and maybe even explain specific parts of their hobby, and voila you’ve succeeded in networking.
This works until you try it in DC and suddenly everyone is an analyst at the State Department and when you ask what they analyze they say “data.”
They also don’t have hobbies they’re willing to talk about, and tend not to have strong feelings about music or TV or books or, really, anything.
I do not like networking in DC.
Networking in DC is an extreme sport
Don’t worry, once you get the job you’ll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that’s 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren’t good at and that aren’t part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.
So many god damn meetings could be a fucking email - or a group chat.
Or skipped.
This is why jesus invented mobile games
The last job I had where I was in the office full time would make the entire team sit through a 3-4 hour meeting with the clients. Well, not with the clients. The clients would be on the phone arguing with each other about what the requirements were. There were almost never any action items beyond “Clients will discuss requirements for next week.”
We were not allowed to have our phones in the meeting. We were not allowed to doodle in the meeting. We had to sit there - for 3-4 hours a week - listening to people argue over a bad VOIP connection.
Why not just use gmeet?
It was over a decade ago so options were limited
The only way this could get any worse would be if the clients were natively speaking another language (one that you do not understand), would fall back to that five minutes into argueing among themselves, and after another five minutes, you hear your own name mentioned.
Just wear comfortable clothes. The old guard is dying off.
Comfortable sure, but not, like, pajamas.
Formal pajamas
Those silk pajamas you see rich people wear in movies from the 80s and prior.
Business casualest.
Unpopular opinion: I think jeans are honestly more comfortable than pajamas. Pajamas feel a bit too loose and airy somehow, jeans and a t shirt or something feel a bit closer and thicker and give a reminder that something is between your skin and the outside while still being soft.
More unpopular opinion, jeans are the worst type of pants that I’ve ever had the displeasure of wearing.
Stretchy jeans are infinitely better than classic denim, give them a try before writing off jeans forever.
Pajamas for the weekend, sweat pants for the work week, jeans for going out, and suits for weddings and funerals.
As a man I’ve interviewed in a button down shirt, a skirt and open toe sandals and gotten a job offer. Only assholes and IBM require a suit and tie these days.
Open-toed sandals with a skirt and button down shirt? If you can’t take fashion seriously, how can I expect you to do your job? Business, business, calves, and then exposed toes? How am I supposed to focus on my job when you do things like that?!
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Guess I’ll start interviewing candidates in the nude.
You know this is literally harassment but the mods won’t see it that way, and if I respond to you like I REALLY want to, I’ll be the one with the ban.
I think you know this and are doing it on purpose.
I think you’re angry because you are very confused.
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This is a choice you’re making.
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haha another neurotypical mocking me for something I have zero control over that makes my life miserable lemmy is so supportive and inclusive.
And all of you ask why I am so angry all the time.
Sorry about your reading comprehension.
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You just have to figure out the ways your autism makes you a good worker and explain it to them. Honestly chatgpt could probably help with the wording if you just explain your autism to it lol
The interview process is what is causing me the most anxiety right now. Lost my job at the end of June, and I KNOW I need to be looking harder, but I’m just dreading the whole interview process. I’ve been procrastinating like crazy…I just don’t want to relearn a whole culture of a new team; it’s so mentally draining. 12 years somewhere and the idea that I have to start all over again…😭
My man, we are in much the same boat. I’ve turned procrastination into an art form. Sleep till noon, fuck around for a few hours before my wife gets home, drink beer all night, “I can handle it all tomorrow!” Boy oh boy do I have plans for tomorrow! Rinse and repeat for going on 2-months, and the severance pay is near an end.
And yeah, it’s like being thrust into a whole new family, because your former family is dead. You’re an orphan, thrust into this new group of relatives you’ve never even heard of. They’re all very nice and smiley, but it’s still scary as hell.
“This is your aunt Sally, she’ll help get you settled. And this is your new daddy, Tom. He’s fair, but a little gruff, really a teddy bear! Just don’t tell him I said that! Ha ha! If you need clean sheets, talk to Hilda over in Housekeeping, she’s so nice! But keep your receipts or she’ll murder you in your sleep. Ha ha!” Been doing this over 3 decades, I 'm socially adept and it’s still intimidating.
My wife is going through it now. Started the highest paying job she’s ever had this past Monday. But hey, at least we’re not foreigners, truly strangers in a strange land like her. Imagine moving exactly halfway around the globe and trying to fit in! That woman is as brave as anyone I’ve ever met.
OTOH, I have zero fear of interviews. Hell, I’d do 4 a day and would welcome the opportunity. It’s the legwork, and paperwork, that I find daunting. At my last job, they interviewed 100 people before landing on me and another guy. Jesus, I had no idea. It was only 1 of 8 resumes I fired into the void. Dumb luck or did I make my own?
Hope an earlier comment of mine helps:
